I believed in reading strategies because I believed in my therapist—until I finally had to admit they were an illusion. I sat opposite my therapist, focusing effortfully on her lesson. She was teaching me how to read post-concussion using strategies: highlighters to highlight words I needed to remember; pens to write notes in the margins…
Category: Writings
Articles, essays, stories, etc.
Cognitive Empathy For Reading Loss After Brain Injury
Cognitive empathy lets you imagine a client’s experience, puts yourself in their shoes, and act accordingly. How you can use it to help restore reading post concussion. Dr. Brian Goldman, a Toronto ER doctor and host of White Coat Black Art on CBC Radio, was on CBC Radio’s Ontario Today at noon, Friday, May 4,…
Reading Loss: The Genesis of Grief, The Seed of PTSD
You don’t know the grief of brain injury until you hear a gentle, compassionate voice drop the devastating news that you can’t read while you’re holding your usual paperback. You never know how brain injury will play out over time. What you think at first is mild becomes worse and worse. Biochemical changes wreak hidden…
Do We Consider Relationships When We Vote?
“I thought and remembered a great deal about my relationships while I was in heaven, but not at all about my work or other earthly issues.” 7 Lessons from Heaven. Mary Neal, MD Voting is an earthly issue; politics and democracy consume our thoughts and conversations these days. What if we reframed our politics in…
Between Two Worlds — A Five-Minute Book Review
I’m reading this genre of books as background research for my trilogy. Fiction only works when it’s rooted in facts; whether or not people believe in existence after death, a writer has to use what people agree on occurs in the spirit world. Those are the facts I need to use in the case of…
Too Many Cooks — A 5-Minute Review
5-Minute 7 May 2022 Review after gamma AVE and biofeedback, photobiomodulation, and visualizing and verbalizing Lindamood-Bell Reading Rehab. I haven’t written a 5-minute review for the last few books. Oops! But I wanted to make sure I did for this one, for I’d reviewed it in 2012 before I underwent a raft of therapies that…
Self-Help Book Launching Into Camp
Self-help book. I didn’t think I’d ever write one. I don’t feel qualified for one. Yeah, I’ve created a website to share knowledge about how to recognize, diagnose, and treat brain injury. It’s relatively easy (though super tiring, draining, exhausting) to research and put together facts, especially since I’ve essentially been doing that since 2005.…
Two 5-Minute Book Reviews!
A Trick of the Light and Death at La Fenice This is a mystery, and a clever one at that, with distractions and clues hidden in details. But what I found outstanding about this book was that it’s perfect for bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses novels as a way to work…
Letter to Anglican Diocesan Bishop About Rev. Coren on Twitter
Dear The Right Reverend Susan Bell, I’m writing to you today about Rev. Michael Coren’s recent tweets about the reporter Travis Dhanraj and his response to me when I challenged him on it. I wouldn’t pursue it except that he represents Christianity and our church to the world and did, in effect, recognize his mistake…